In October 2014, a student at RWTH Aachen put an app on the market that let strangers speak to each other without names. Alessio Borgmeyer was still a student, and the app was small enough to be defined by a rule: you could only see what people within a few kilometres were posting.
That constraint, not a clever algorithm, was the idea. Posts were capped at 150 characters, later raised to 240. Readers voted up or down, and anything that reached minus five disappeared. The result felt less like a global feed and more like a hallway wall in a student dorm.
Borgmeyer built a team around him. Tim Schmitz took finance, Niklas Henckell the community, and Alexander Linewitsch the product. The company set up in Berlin. In November 2016 came a feature called Heimat, allowing users to post to their hometown even when they had left it. In 2017 the Traveller Feed let visitors talk to locals in foreign cities.
Money followed. In June 2017 the company announced six million dollars from investors in Silicon Valley and Europe, among them Redalpine Venture Partners and Global Founders Capital, with a stated plan to enter the US. Advertising began in March 2018, local promotions in 2019, a premium subscription in 2021.
What the app never fully solved was the cost of anonymity. Moderation is done by volunteer users, whose selection criteria are not public, and critics say majority voting nudges them toward the crowd instead of the rules. In November 2017 police identified a Trier student who had posted a shooting threat. A University of Passau study showed that the location of about 96 percent of 38,000 sampled posts could be pinpointed within 10 metres, which undercut the promise of anonymity. Critics also said it did not meet Germany's NetzDG reporting duties.
Today The Jodel Venture GmbH employs about 60 people in Berlin and the app was at version 7.132 in early 2025. Survey data from May 2025 puts it at about four percent of social media users in Germany.
The quiet lesson: a hard limit, here distance, can be a product. The harder lesson is that a promise like anonymity carries a debt you keep paying for years.